Anthony Rota had no choice but to resign as House Speaker after he invited a Nazi veteran to Parliament. But, as former NDP leader Tom Mulcair writes in a column for CTVNews.ca, if history is going to retain the profound embarrassment caused by his mistake, it should also recognize the contributions Rota has made to democratic life.
In what way is he a “scapegoat”?
Parliament did something that everyone in Parliament was quite pleased about. Watch the video. Not a concern in the house to be found. Everything that took place was perfectly acceptable.
But, later, the Reddit witch hunters discovered a mistake. Mistakes are no big deal – humans make them all the time. In fact, if you don’t make mistakes you are not human. But the crazies with no sense of realty lack an understanding of that and started banging pots crying about the mistake.
Parliament stared to worry that it would escalate to something more dire, and as such it was agreed that Rota would take the fall to tame the crazy onlookers with no sense of reality in order to avoid a tragedy. That’s the performance theatre of politics. Nothing out of the ordinary to be seen here.
When you bring someone in to be celebrated by the house it’s generally understood that you’ve gone to reasonable lengths to make sure that the person has never sworn an oath to Hitler or is otherwise politically toxic.
It was a reasonable assumption of the MPs that this vetting had been done. Everyone involved in inviting/selecting this person to be celebrated should resign because of their negligence.
If my colleague invited someone to our year-end party and encouraged us to publicly cheer for someone that I didn’t know had sworn an oath to Hitler, I would want them to resign too.
Oh.
Indeed.